A heartening dose of four-legged medicine

By Jim Scarantino

Quince pushes his wet nose into a patient’s room at Albuquerque’s Heart Hospital. Valerie Peyton is on her back recovering from a heart attack. She looks tired, battered. Quince catches Petyon’s eye. Color returns to her cheeks. A smile breaks across her face.

As time in a brief 30-day Legislative Session ticks away, will these measures fizzle out?

By Marisa Demarco

Charges of corruption abound in this state, and with each confirmation of an ethics breech, public trust dwindles. Accusations of cronyism, the conviction of former state treasurers, charges that politicians skimmed millions off construction funds for the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Courthouse—the parade of shamefaced officials grows ever-longer. Though the governor set health care at the top of the legislative priorities this session, a handful of ethics reform bills also made it onto the agenda. Many were introduced late in the game and haven't been receiving much of a push from the governor or state legislators.

I am writing this column several days before the 22 states holding Democratic primaries (New Mexico among them) will have made their decisions on the matter of the party’s next presidential candidate on Super Tuesday.

Dateline: Croatia--Hundreds of Croatians painted themselves blue and wore silly white hats in an attempt to break the world record for dressing up as Smurfs. A total of 395 turned up dressed as the popular cartoon characters in the town of Komin. But when they contacted Guinness officials to register their record, they were told it was too late. A spokesperson for the organizers said, “We read on the Internet that the record was 290 people held by a group of Americans and decided to beat it. We had TV, radio and print media report our success.” Unfortunately, the smurfy record had already been topped last July by 451 people at Warwick University Students’ Union in England. One organizer of the wasted Croatian record attempt told reporters, “We could easily have got more Smurfs, but we thought that over a hundred more than the American record we found on the Internet would be enough.”

[Re: Letters, “Red-Light Cameras are the Devil,” Jan. 31-Feb. 6] Let’s hope “impoverished college student” Stephanie Porter isn’t majoring in logic, since she doesn’t seem to catch the disconnect between running a red light and claiming to be “innocent” and “law-abiding.”